Cinema

George Clooney Gave Each Friend $1 Million. Now He Offers a Cure for Racism

Clooney recalls handing his friends $1 million each after meeting Amal, and explains how The Midnight Sky, his biggest film yet, offers a remedy for racism.

Husam Sam Asi 14 December 2020

Husam Sam Asi with George Clooney during the Tomorrowland interviews in 2015 — Husam Sam Asi with George Clooney. Photo: ASI Photos.

When George Clooney met the Lebanese lawyer Amal Alamuddin in 2013, he asked her to help him write his will. “I didn’t have a family or children, so I wanted to divide my money among my friends, because most of them don’t have much and they need money to send their kids to college and other things,” Clooney tells me over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “When Amal and I got together, and I got a huge share of the profits from Gravity, which was an enormous box-office hit, we decided to give each of my friends a million dollars and be done with it, without writing a will and waiting.”

Those friends had helped Clooney when he arrived in Hollywood broke, in an old car, from his home state of Kentucky in the early 1980s. He was 20, and he moved in with his aunt. At first he landed only bit parts in television series and horror films, until luck struck and he won the role of Dr Doug Ross in ER. The series made him famous and opened the doors of the big screen in 1996, when he took his first leading film role in the horror film From Dusk Till Dawn. Leading roles in a string of big commercial films followed, cementing his global fame and lifting him to the top of Hollywood.

“When I was 20 and starting out as an actor, Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out and all those actors were shining, then The Outsiders came out and all of its actors were shining, and I always felt that I wanted to be in films like Sean Penn’s. I ended up in the series The Facts of Life and a film called Return to Horror High. In my line of work you spend most of your career just trying to get a job, and if you’re lucky enough to be able to choose, then it’s about what you choose, what you do and what’s right. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong.”

Clooney went to Hollywood to follow in the footsteps of his father, the journalist and political activist Nick Clooney, by promoting his liberal principles and raising important social and political issues, at home and abroad, in his films. To do that, he moved into directing and producing.

In 2002 he directed his first film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, about a television game-show host who claims to have worked for the CIA. He followed it with Good Night, and Good Luck, about the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow’s stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunt. In The Ides of March he examined corruption in American presidential campaigns, in The Monuments Men he shone a light on the Nazis’ looting of art during the Second World War, and in Suburbicon he tackled the dire consequences of greed and racism in American society. He also produced three films about the Middle East: Syriana, Argo and The Men Who Stare at Goats. This month Clooney releases The Midnight Sky, a disaster film that Netflix has financed with a budget to rival Hollywood’s blockbusters.

“This is the biggest project I’ve ever done. In budget terms it’s almost double any film I’ve directed before. And its themes are certainly similar to Good Night, and Good Luck, in talking about big issues on a small scale,” the Hollywood star says.

Less fiction, more documentary

Clooney plays Augustine, a scientist who stays behind alone at an Arctic research station after a catastrophe has devastated the Earth. When he realises that a crew of astronauts is on its way home from K-23, a moon of Jupiter where they have been testing whether humans could live there, he tries to reach them to warn them not to come back.

Clooney’s earlier films explored political and social subjects rooted in reality. The Midnight Sky is science fiction, set in space and in the Arctic in the future.

“If you look at the coronavirus pandemic we’re living through now, the film becomes less fiction and more documentary,” Clooney laughs. “I like the idea of talking about what we can do to each other if we don’t look after ourselves, and I like talking about how hate is a poison dividing us in the United States. It’s dividing other countries in many ways too. We see the anger between people who believe in Covid and people who don’t. You see all of these things. And if things go on like this for 30 or 40 years, it’s not far-fetched that we destroy the Earth. So I like the idea of talking about how these are all man-made problems. Covid is man-made, certainly in our reaction to it and our failure to contain it. So is blowing up the world in a nuclear confrontation, or tearing a hole in the atmosphere through climate change. All of it is man-made. And if it’s man-made, it can be undone, and we can do something about it.”

The film is adapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel Good Morning, Midnight, about survivors of an environmental catastrophe that has destroyed the Earth. When Netflix sent Clooney the screenplay to star in, he liked it so much that he decided to direct it himself. With Netflix’s blessing, he made changes to suit his vision, such as cutting most of his character’s dialogue. Augustine spends most of the film alone in the Arctic with a girl who does not speak.

“Why would I talk if there’s nobody to talk to?” Clooney laughs. “It was written as if he was talking to an audience that wasn’t there. So I asked the composer to write the dialogue in music, so that I wouldn’t have to say anything, and that made him seem as lonely as he felt.”

He also raised the astronauts’ ages from their twenties to middle age to make their conversations more credible. “For me, there’s no weight or emotion when someone in their twenties says they want to go home. But when a man in his fifties says he wants to go home to see his wife and kids, that carries a lot of weight, and his thoughts on the philosophy of life and the meaning of time mean so much more when you’re someone with that experience.”

No child is born racist

The biggest and most important change was to make the crew’s scientist, played by Felicity Jones, a pregnant woman and to pair her romantically with the crew’s black commander, played by David Oyelowo, so that her unborn child becomes humanity’s hope of survival on another planet.

The irony is that the film sets out to save humanity from extinction and give it a new home on another planet, even though humanity was the virus that destroyed this one. Shouldn’t the job of protecting the universe go to creatures less evil, less racist and more aware?

“That’s what we’re saying in many ways. We’re talking about behaving better this time, maybe,” Clooney replies. “No child is born racist. You have to be taught it. It’s a learned experience. So we’re saying, let’s start again and try to avoid that this time. Let’s find ways to do it. It doesn’t hurt that it’s an African American man and a white woman, with a mixed-race baby coming into the world. That’s certainly a good way to start.”

Clooney’s campaign against racism, in the United States and beyond, reaches well beyond his films into the media and the opinion pages. When the Black Lives Matter protests erupted this summer, he wrote an article for the Daily Beast describing racism in America as a pandemic that has lasted 400 years. To end it, he urged Americans to vote for politicians who do not incite hatred and violence, as Trump and his supporters do.

The irony is that racism was also rife in the United States under the Democrats, whom Clooney champions, and that liberal Hollywood opened its doors to people of colour and to Muslims only recently, after Trump took power.

“Don’t forget you had a black president for eight years, and it takes a long time for these things to filter through and become part of society, and obviously we haven’t got there yet,” Clooney replies. “The other thing is that there’s an overreaction. When your president stands up and says he wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States, the overreaction from the other side is to put them on television. And when your president says the press is the enemy of the people, you see more journalism, and you see it become more effective. Pressure from one side actually helps to open up the other.”

Critics are divided over the story and themes of The Midnight Sky. Artistically, though, the film stands out for its stunning visuals, a moving score and a fine performance from Clooney, who lost about 11 kilograms to play Augustine, which could help him to an Oscar nomination this season. Netflix released the film in cinemas at the end of last week and will stream it from 23 December.